Historic Voyage as a Catalyst for Inspiring
Change
Ann Melinda Bell
Abstract—Navigator Nainoa Thompson for Hōkūle‘a, a replica of
an ancient voyaging canoe, coined the phrase, “Navigating Change,”
to implant inspiration in the hearts and minds of Hawaii’s youth
to take better care of their island home. Ultimately, it was about
instilling hope and a cultural based value of responsibility in our
younger generation. In 2001, the Navigating Change Educational
Partnership (NCEP) was formed and began to develop tools to complement Hōkūle‘a’s voyage, based on the Navigating Change vision, to
the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. During the voyage, over 1,800
students were involved via satellite teleconferencing conversations
with crewmembers. The voyage generated almost 2,500 column
inches of newspaper coverage and nearly two hours of television
news coverage. For the past three years, over 200 teachers have
been directly involved in implementing a comprehensive Teacher’s
Guide to Navigating Change. The end of the voyage turned into a
new beginning for Navigating Change: A student-driven community
day was held in May 2005 with over 5,000 people in attendance as
Hōkūle‘a sailed into Kailua Bay to honor the cumulative conservation
learning and work of hundreds of students. In addition, the Harold
K. L. Castle Foundation funded a half-time NCEP position to help
steer the vision of Navigating Change into the future.
Recognizing Change______________
When Nainoa Thompson was a boy growing up in Hawai‘i,
the reefs were teeming with pāpio (juvenile Jack fish), goatfish, and āholehole (Hawaiian flagtail). Mullet drifted in so
thickly they looked like the reflection of dark clouds on the
water. Nainoa’s keen sense of the ocean world around him
sharpened as he dove for lobsters, surfed the waves, and
learned to fish beside men who filled their boats full to feed
all the community. Back then, Maunalua Bay provided
islanders with a critical lifeline, connecting them directly
to the teeming source of their livelihood. Both nursery and
spawning ground, the bay gave shelter and food sources
to millions of native fish that in turn nourished the bodies
and souls of the islanders who lived in the lee of the bay’s
ahupua‘a (a traditional land and community division running
from mountain to sea). It also served as outdoor classroom,
and the lessons Nainoa learned there guide him to this day
Ann Melinda Bell, Outdoor Recreation Planner, U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, Honolulu, HI, U.S.A.
In: Watson, Alan; Sproull, Janet; Dean, Liese, comps. 2007. Science and
stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values: eighth World Wilderness Congress symposium: September 30–October 6, 2005; Anchorage, AK.
Proceedings RMRS-P-49. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture,
Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station.
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as he navigates Hōkūle‘a, the replica Polynesian voyaging
canoe, through the ocean waters of the 21st century.
“Whether people want to recognize it or not, we are connected to our natural environment,” Nainoa says. Many
people living in Hawai‘i today don’t understand how their
disconnection from their surroundings affects their wellbeing. “What we do to the land and sea we do to ourselves.
So, if we take care of even the smallest portion of land or
ocean or the smallest creature, we take care of ourselves.”
Today, only 50 years later, things have changed drastically. A private marina, shopping centers, and condos
line the adjacent shoreline of what was once an enormous
ancient fishpond feeding into the bay. While natural tidal
flows brought in fish that provided sustenance for the entire
community, today this passageway is a dredged, silt-covered
thoroughfare that provides access for boats of all kinds,
including every imaginable kind of boat or water toy. The
adrenaline rush from fast boats and video games has replaced
that gained from exploring and experiencing the natural
world. No longer can you teach a child how to find lobsters.
Lobster populations have dwindled to the point that diving
is not worth the effort. Although patches of coral in deeper
areas are still alive with sponges, algae, and invertebrates,
the overall biomass of fish has dropped by 80 percent during
the last 50 years. The large schools of reef fish are gone and
the sizes of individual fish are greatly diminished.
While natural resource agencies and organizations and
community-based initiatives have struggled for years to
protect the remnants of our native ecosystems, they have
had little success in gaining much political support for the
importance of their efforts. The total state funding for natural resource protection remains tragically low—less than 1
percent of the state budget. Degraded resources are accepted
as “normal,” alien species are often accepted as Hawaiian,
more and more native species are threatened with extinction,
and the potential for negative impacts on human health are
increasing. “A child today sees a world that is substandard
and degraded,” says Nainoa. “Through the eyes of a child,
this picture is the picture of what is healthy.”
Nainoa’s passion is to reconnect people to their world. He
believes that learning to care about “place” requires teaching
children healthy traditional values and demonstrating that
actions have real solutions. “When a child loses the capacity to understand or care about place, a disconnect occurs,”
Nainoa says. “If the gap is present now, it is only going to
get bigger in the future. We must help students reconnect by
providing opportunities that reawaken their observational
skills and help them understand the value of nurturing their
own spirituality and physical well-being through taking care
of their place.”
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Historic Voyage as a Catalyst for Inspiring Change
Navigating Change ______________________
Navigator Nainoa Thompson envisioned reconnecting
people with place by sailing the Hōkūle‘a among the wild and
protected Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (fig. 1). Calling his
idea “Navigating Change,” he wanted to “bring the beauty of
the Earth’s rare wildlife to living rooms and classrooms to
create an awareness of the difference between where nature
is protected and what happens when it is not.”
Primarily an educational program echoing his father’s
vision, Navigating Change was designed to inspire people
to mālama, take care of, their native land. Thompson wants
people to understand that to live well and be healthy, your
ocean must also be healthy, and that for your ocean to be
healthy, it must mirror a healthy land. Navigating Change
provides an opportunity to show people what they have lost
and what they need to do to reverse the damage. At the core
of Navigating Change is Hōkūle‘a, a modern-day reincarnation of a double-hulled sailing vessel that has accomplished
almost inconceivable navigational feats, using science built
upon a foundation of ancestral knowledge.
Hōkūle‘a and Hawaiian Wilderness
A thousand years before Columbus approached North
America, Polynesians were sailing across the Pacific. They voyaged to Hawai‘i first from the Marquesas around 1,900 years
ago. Then around 1200 A.D., a second group of Polynesians
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headed north from Tahiti, which lies approximately 1,000
miles (1,609 km) to the southwest of the Marquesas (Wilder
2004). These long-distance voyages were perhaps made to
seek more abundant island resources, to escape oppression
due to societal conflicts, or perhaps for exploration purposes.
Over long days and nights on the open sea, Polynesians
continued to hone their traditional practice of wayfinding
by implementing their vast knowledge of the stars, winds,
birds, and waves that guided them to Hawai‘i.
In the late 1970s, several hundred years after such
long-distance voyaging activity ceased, a group including
anthropologist Ben Finney, artist Herb Kawainui Kāne,
and waterman Tommy Holmes, designed and facilitated the
construction of a modern-day voyaging canoe modeled after
ancient, double-hulled sailing vessels that had platforms
lashed to the crossbeams. The canoe was named Hōkūle‘a
after the star of gladness, which is the Hawaiian name for
Arcturas, the zenith star that marks the islands of Hawai‘i
(Wilder 2004). To find a navigator skilled in the ancient
ways was no easy feat, but eventually Mau Piailug, from
the tiny island of Satawal in Micronesia, agreed to share
his ancestral knowledge. His teachings inspired young Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson, Bruce Blankenfeld, Shorty
Bertlemann, and Chad Babayan, to spend years learning
the ways of waves, wind, and stars.
Over the last 30 years, Hōkūle‘a has sailed more than
100,000 miles (160,934 km) across the Pacific. On its last
long-distance voyage, in May 2004, Hōkūle‘a followed in the
Figure 1—Hōkūle‘a sails past Nihoa Island in the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge (photo by Na‘alehu
Anthony ©, used with permission).
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wake of Hawai‘i’s ancestors to the Northwestern Hawaiian
Islands. These islands, all but one of which are within the Hawaiian Islands and Midway Atoll National Wildlife refuges,
extend along the northern half of the Hawaiian archipelago,
reaching over 1,200 miles (1,931 km) northwest of the main
Hawaiian Islands. This string of atolls, reefs, and islets
embodies the definition of wilderness, and in 1974 most of
the emergent land in this area was proposed as wilderness
under the U.S. Wilderness Act. Further protection was afforded the surrounding state waters when the Governor of
Hawai‘i signed legislation creating the State Marine Refuge
in October of 2005.
Extending out 50 miles (80 km), the marine ecosystem is
being studied for a potential designation as the country’s
largest National Marine Sanctuary. This coral reef ecosystem is believed to be one of the last of its kind, alive with
vestiges of marine and island wildlife that have long since
disappeared from the main Hawaiian Islands. It is also one
of the last places of its size on the planet in which dominant large marine predators live in concert with a diverse
entourage of coral, fish, and birds, indicating a healthy,
balanced system. The numbers and varieties of species are
exceptional—thousands of species exist in the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands and nowhere else on the planet.
But because of their remote location and fragility, the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands will rarely be able to
accommodate visitors seeking to enjoy their solitude and
primitive recreational opportunities. Instead, the Fish and
Wildlife Service is working with staff from the National
Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the
State of Hawai‘i to, “bring the place to the people, rather
than the people to the place.” The challenge is to infuse in
their audiences the spirit of wilderness found within these
islands.
Navigating Change Educational
Partnership
Hōkūle‘a’s 18-day voyage through the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands was the culmination of almost three years of
preparation. In the winter of 2002, Nainoa Thompson pulled
together a partnership of agencies to create educational
projects and products that coordinate with and support
the Navigating Change voyage and vision. He directed the
partnership group on a course that would impact the lives
of hundreds of students and their families. The partnership included key educators from the Polynesian Voyaging
Society, Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i Department of Land
and Natural Resources, Hawai‘i Department of Education,
Hawai‘i Maritime Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA), National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the University
of Hawai‘i. The group was soon labeled as the Navigating
Change Educational Partnership (NCEP).
In September 2002, Nainoa Thompson and several NCEP
educators sailed on the NOAA vessel Rapture as part of the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Reef Ecological Assessment
and Monitoring Program. Concurrently, the Bishop Museum’s
Hawai‘i Maritime Center opened a permanent Navigating
Change interactive exhibit. The exhibit, funded by the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
and highlighting the research expedition, allowed NCEP
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Historic Voyage as a Catalyst for Inspiring Change
educators to transmit almost real-time video segments via
cutting edge satellite technology to students visiting the
museum. A regularly updated interagency website (www.
hawaiiatolls.org) created on board the vessel, along with
significant media coverage, generated increasing interest
in these far-flung islands. During this time, Hōkūle‘a was
in dry dock undergoing extensive restoration as volunteers
repaired dry rot, sanded, varnished, and carefully pulled
lines taut.
By the spring of 2003, NCEP had developed a package of
teacher resources, a Northwestern Hawaiian Islands map/
poster, and a series of five video modules focused on specific Navigating Change educational themes. In April 2003,
Hōkūle‘a departed on a seven-week statewide sail in which
the canoe would visit most of the main Hawaiian Islands,
allowing students to meet the canoe and learn about voyaging
and Navigating Change first hand. A series of nine teachers’
workshops were held in conjunction with this trip.
Hōkūle‘a’s Voyage
Hōkūle‘a was scheduled to set sail to the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands in late summer of 2003. Unfortunately,
two weeks before departure a threatening hurricane and
a broken mast on the escort vessel delayed departure.
With winter weather approaching, Hōkūle‘a’s voyage was
rescheduled for May 2004. Although disappointed, NCEP
took advantage of the time to fine tune its educational products. In the fall of 2003, the State of Hawai‘i’s Department
of Education, with assistance from NCEP, aired on Public
Television a three-part series on Navigating Change via an
interactive distance-learning science program. The teacher’s
guide was updated to incorporate the Department of Education’s content and performance standards in science, social
studies, language arts, and Nā Honua Mauli Ola (Hawai‘i
guidelines for culturally healthy and responsive learning
environments), so that teachers could easily incorporate
the guide into their standardized curricula. This updated
guide was reworked into a framework of digestible topical
units that coordinated with the existing poster-sized map,
video segments, photographs, Power Point presentations,
the Hawai‘i Maritime Center exhibit, and websites.
On May 23, 2004, Hōkūle‘a set sail for the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands. To improve interaction with the public, the
12-member crew included a journalist, Jan TenBruggencate
from the Honolulu Advertiser, and an education and ecological protocol officer, Ann Bell of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service. During the voyage, more than eighty classrooms and
approximately 1,800 students were connected to the canoe’s
crew via satellite telephone (fig. 2). During the first two
weeks of the voyage, daily 45-minute conversations allowed
students from across Hawai‘i, as far east as Maryland, and
as far south as Samoa, to ask questions and learn about the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. TenBruggencate reported
on day-to-day life on board the canoe, often in front-page
articles, instilling a greater awareness in adults of the traditional Hawaiian value of mālama, caring for our land and
sea. Three websites followed the voyage (www.pvs-hawaii.
com, www.hawaiiatolls.org, www.navigatingchange.org),
posting extensive information along with journal articles by
Dr. Cherie Shehata, and the public could track the canoe’s
daily position via a satellite tracking system. The voyage
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Bell
Figure 2—Navigator Nainoa Thompson on satellite phone while U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee,
Ann Bell, helps coordinate communication with students back home (photo by Dr. Randall Kosaki).
generated almost 2.500 column inches of newspaper coverage and nearly two hours of television news coverage.
Results ________________________
The true measure of success is perhaps best told by the
participants themselves. LaTitia A. McCoy, an 8th grade
teacher at Labadieville Middle School in Thibodaux, Louisiana, wrote:
I cannot say enough about the resulting experiences that
these students had the opportunity to be a part of! By integrating the Navigating Change project into all subject areas,
the students were actively engaged in the connections that
were being made. In Science, the students learned about
the ocean currents, trade winds, and navigation using the
constellations above. In Mathematics, tracking of the vessel
was done using the longitude and latitude coordinates daily.
In Social Studies, the geography of the islands was taught
and students learned in-depth information about the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that most of them never knew
existed before this project. (Most students didn’t even know
that the 50th state of Hawaii consisted of more than one island
when we began this project!!) The English/Language Arts
teachers even became involved by exploring new vocabulary
words that the students were exposed to. In the midst of the
project, every eighth grade student could tell you what the
Hōkūle‘a was, where and what the NWHI were, and how this
event was to make an impact on their lives.
I’m sure that the impact of this event will continue far
longer than any of us can imagine, but some immediate signs
that these young people absorbed the information that was
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being presented to them were evident in their responses to
any question that was asked of them about the project. They
responded with quick connections being made from Hawai‘i
being surrounded by water, and Louisiana being a coastal
state. The erosion that takes place at an alarming rate is a
concern for most South Louisiana residents and these young
people are aware of the problem and hope to slow the process
in their lifetime. Protecting the ecosystem is a concern also,
and hearing first-hand about endangered birds that were
encountered through the voyage of the Hōkūle‘a brought the
vision of a harmonious ecosystem to life for them.
“Cultural harmony is another issue that most young people
here in Louisiana deal with on a daily basis. Hearing with
their own ears (from Bruce) during one of the teleconferences that people of all races and ethnic backgrounds work
together toward one common goal is an important asset for
all crewmembers. It doesn’t matter what the color of your
skin is or where you were raised only that we are all human
beings and together we can make this world a better place
to live in for the future. This was the overall feeling that the
students at L.M.S. left with after completing their last teleconference. The feeling was overwhelming for me as a teacher
to see these students absorbing this ‘real-life’ connection that
was being made. This entire experience is one that no one at
Labadieville Middle School will soon forget!”
You have impacted over 120 students’ lives in our school
alone, not to mention all of the adults who read the local
reports from our reporting media.
From Kilauea E. School on Kaua‘i, Richard Larson said:
…the experience of having the children speak with you
on the canoe was the most significant event from the whole
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Historic Voyage as a Catalyst for Inspiring Change
year and it happened the day before school was out. It was a
fitting celebration for the year.
“For many years I have used the voyaging canoe as a
symbol for the year, the cooperation, the bringing together
the knowledge of the past and the present; the unseen and
the seen... With so much focus on standards and assessment,
I have been able to integrate what I believe to be important
into the daily activities, and the curriculum. The values of
‘ohana (family), aloha (compassion), kuleana (responsibility)
are just some of the cultural aspects that we use as part of
the tapestry of our day, our year together.
The end of a voyage turned into a new beginning for Navigating Change. A student-driven community day, organized
by Learning Education Technology Academy, was held in
May 2005 with over 5,000 people in attendance as Hōkūle‘a
sailed into Kailua Bay (fig. 3) to honor the cumulative
conservation learning and work of hundreds of students.
Seven teachers who were previously involved in developing
and field testing the Navigating Change Teacher’s Guide in
their classrooms were chosen to set sail in August 2005 on
a NOAA ship to explore and produce lesson plans about the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. In addition, the Harold K.
L. Castle Foundation funded a half-time NCEP position to
help steer the vision of Navigating Change into the hearts
and minds of Hawai‘i’s children.
More than 60 students spent the night on Hōkūle‘a during
the fall of 2005 as it anchored in Maunalua Bay, a bay that
nourished local families for hundreds of years and inspired
Nainoa Thompson as a child. With Hōkūle‘a acting as a floating laboratory, students created their own baseline studies
of the coral reef (fig. 4), searched the night skies and learned
Figure 3—Hōkūle‘a arrives in Kailua, Hawai‘i, in the
main Hawaiian Islands to celebrate the work of students
engaged in learning about their local bay and offshore
islets (photo by Katie Laing).
Figure 4—La Piétra—Hawai‘i School for Girls Environmental Science Class discovers the difference between native
and non-native algae in Maunalua Bay, Hawai‘i (photo by
Jessica Carew).
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Historic Voyage as a Catalyst for Inspiring Change
the art of wayfinding from Thompson, and experienced the
human lessons learned by working and sailing a voyaging
canoe together. In these acts, the values of culture and science
combine to show students that to help their crewmembers,
their families, and the ocean is to help all life become sustainable and healthy. As Thompson explains it, “No longer
do we seek only the knowledge of how to voyage between
islands. We seek lessons to carry home to our children—ways
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to inspire the present generation to love and preserve our
Earth as a sanctuary for those who will inherit it.”
Reference_______________________
Wilder, Kathryn. 2004. Follow the stars: a voyage of warriors on a sea
of hope. Spirit of Aloha. July–August issue. Available: http://www.
spiritofaloha.com/features/0704/stars.html. [April 2, 2006].
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